Portraits, paintings and personal data
Portraiture
Brilliant discusses a few aspects of portraiture that would seem to be crucial in developing a digital portraiture. First is the realization that there are many ways that a person portrays themselves to the world, and that only one of these portrayals can be caricatured in a portrait. Each mask that a person wears is unique not only to the particular way in which the person himself wants to be viewed, but also in the context in which that portrayal is presented. The context is dependent upon the physical setting, the social expectation of that person and those of his type (to be discussed shortly), and most importantly, the surrounding people. Indeed, the portrait of a person is heavily dependent on external cues.
Furthermore, the artists conception of the person plays an important role. In any medium in which a person is portrayed to other people, there must be someone externalizing the qualities of the person being portrayed. This often times is someone other than the subject of the portraiture, but even in the case where the artist and subject are one, there still exists the process of externalization. In this process, often there is a tendency to typify the subject in some way, to make the particular view of him seem more compelling.
In creating a digital portrait, we cannot merely present information blindly. Rather, since portraiture is a representation of a person, we must choose that information that coherently and uniquely portrays a person. We must also be cognizant of who is going to be interpreting the portraiture, as well as where it is going to be displayed. Both of these factors can have a profound influence on the connotation of the the portraiture.
Privacy
I think that it is clear that we have no idea how much information about us is just floating around, available for public use. Some of this information is harmless (of course this is dependent on many things), some of it is useful for others to know (perhaps email address falls into this category), but I suspect that most of it doesn't need to be let out, and could be potentially very dangerous.
That said, the issue of privacy is very important to portraiture. Essentially, a portrait (especially a digital one) is a set of information about a person. When portraits were made on a physical medium, they were considered a bit safer, since most physical media are difficult to copy. Also, since most of these portraits were visual, they portrayed mostly ethereal information about a person, such as mood. They were usually for limited and or brief consumption, as well.
All of these assumptions about a portrait are reversed for digital data. The portrait can be easily copied, without the holder of the portrait knowing. The information they portray are exact, such as address, or interests. They last forever, and can be gotten by anyone that has digital access (provided they are posted). Indeed, digital portraits are usually made for everyone to consume for as long as they want. Yet they are every much as personal and representative as traditional portraits.
Media Lab Business Cards
This is a surprisingly difficult task. Since all previous forms of portraiture were human readable, I think making a portrait using colored bars should also be human readable. Furthermore, a portrait portrays qualitative aspects of a persona, so using the bars to portray informational or numerical seems incorrect. These constraints make the job of creating a portrait of a person using the colored bars on the top of their business card very difficult.
Of course, the bars can portray data such as to which groups the person belongs, but this sort of information is much more easily portrayed and conveyed using plain text on the card. Ideally, the colored bars should portray some data about the person that is not easily portrayed using text.
I apologize for the lack of graphical elements in this assignment, but midterm week (for us undergraduates) is hell, and I haven't had much time to devote to thinking hard about what to represent in a portrait on the Media Lab business cards.
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